Prospective informant Richard van Zwol (59) can tell them everything about one spearhead of the four forming parties: limiting migration. As chairman of the State Committee on Demographic Developments 2050, Van Zwol presented a report of more than 400 pages in January. Moderate population growth to maintain broad prosperity, was his message.
As Van Zwol did in an interview with NRC do his best to get that message across to the entire House of Representatives. “High and rapid population growth will eventually lead to scarcity and inequality. I can assume that broad prosperity for all, social cohesion, and care for the most vulnerable in society are not 'left or right'.”
Apart from migration, Van Zwol can probably discuss all issues with PVV, NSC, VVD and BBB. There are few former civil servants with such a track record in The Hague; NRC called him a “silent force of the national government” in 2017 around his transfer to the Council of State. He works as a state councilor in the Advisory Department, and he is chairman of the supervisory board of accountant EY in the Netherlands.
He was not yet thirty years old when he helped Prime Minister Wim Kok in 1994 to write the coalition agreement for Purple 1. Van Zwol, a graduate in legal-administrative sciences and public finance, was the only civil servant who worked with Excell.
As a civil servant at AZ, he was formation secretary in the Balkenende II, III and IV cabinets. He had to keep the pace in the negotiations.
He later served as Secretary General of the Ministries of General Affairs, Finance and the Interior and Kingdom Relations.
Politics has a duty of honor to make the relationship between government and citizens healthy again, he said in 2021 as chairman of the Scientific Institute of the CDA. The rule of law and local government must be strengthened, people must be able to participate and the government must become subservient again, he argued in a vision of the party's direction.
CDA leader Bontenbal was only aware of Van Zwol's nomination shortly before, he told NOS. He is “disappointed” by it and concludes that the forming parties, after informants Plasterk and Putters (both PvdA), apparently cannot supply their own people.
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